At the risk of sounding bad you don’t tend to see a lot of men like Charley Pride singing country, but upon listening to his voice you can understand quite easily how he fits in just fine since he can carry a tune with the best of them. That being said music was never really his intention when he was younger, as he wanted to be a baseball player for quite a while. After serving in the US Army however and playing on the American Negro League for a while it was kind of apparent that Charley was kind of stuck. But while he was never picked up by a major league team his voice was discovered while playing ball and he was given a bonus to sing before the games to drum up attendance. That’s not a bad way to get going really since his baseball career, however much joy it brought him, wasn’t doing much after he lost a step following an injury.

Here are some of his best songs.

Voice - Look - Folks - Stereotype - Man

Honestly his voice and his look don’t seem to match up. That might sound absolutely wrong to some folks but it’s very true. It could just be the stereotype of expecting a black man to sound a certain way, but the voice he was gifted with is just impressive. One has to wonder just how his voice got noticed while playing baseball, but it’s no wonder at all how his coach or manager thought that it would possibly drum up the attendance. If he did even half this good before the games then it’s possible he became one of the star attractions of any game he was playing in. Plus, he got another $10 for this, which back then wasn’t a fortune but was still good money.